Will I love Gravity and Grace?

This is a book of brief paragraphs and aphorisms. It can be picked up and read anywhere and give you a thought you've not had before. In fact, many of the ideas will challenge your thinking. Weil was a wild character and this book is posthumous, but don't let that stop you from enjoying the stunning sentences. Examples:

Human life is impossible. But it is only affliction which makes us feel this.

To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.

We are drawn to a thing… show more.

Though I am not religious, I have been aesthetically moved and spiritually stirred by these deeply personal, profoundly philosophical, and poetically enigmatic essays, which I find myself returning to when faced with the most fundamental questions about our spiritual lives.

Written by a French Jewish convert to Christianity whose own suffering is exquisitely attuned to the suffering of others, these essays have continued to inspire readers from across a broad spectrum of religious and philosophical orientations—including the most secular among us.

Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace is an essential work of Christian mysticism written in profound, aphoristic style that aligns with its main philosophical tenets. Weil argues that emptying, or even nullifying, oneself is imperative in the context of true faith. God does not exist within the limited parameters of human subjectivity and the “created” world, so it stands to reason that the only way to apprehend God is through voiding. Indeed, even faith itself must be sacrificed under Weil’s philosophy, because to believe in something is to avoid nothing.

This book’s conviction is hauntingly persuasive. Its aphorisms accumulate to… show more.